Women in photography: Maja Hitij on personalising sports and photojournalism

In high school, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Maja Hitij told of her dream to photograph the world’s top sporting events. Now, at 33-years-old, she is a full-time staff photographer in Getty Images' European team, specialising in sports.

A keen sportsperson herself, Maja runs marathons, and fits in training before and after work. It’s important for her to keep in shape to deal with the physical demands of her job – the hours are long and getting into position shot after shot is physically draining. "Covering major sporting events is a dream come true but can also be really intense," she says. "I also do a bit of bouldering to give me strength – if you're not 90kgs, you can just get pushed aside."

Expressing herself

Maja studied journalism in her native Slovenia, and fell in love with photography during her studies. "I realised that as a journalist you're trying to find the best way to express yourself, be it through radio, or videos... I found that my way was photography."

As a journalist you try to find the best way to express yourself. I found that my way was photography.

Focusing on hard news, she cut her teeth at leading agencies – in 2008, she travelled to Jerusalem to intern with Associated Press for a year and then spent two years training with DPA, a German news organisation based in Berlin. She has covered global stories as diverse as the Egyptian elections, the refugee crisis in Greece, life in the Gaza Strip and home affairs in Germany.

Maja joined Getty in 2016, and has spent the past year working out of Düsseldorf as one of the agency's sport photographers. Agency life suits her working style, because she enjoys mucking in with the team. "Sometimes you're covering something less interesting, but at other times you're doing work that really interests you. You have to be OK with that dichotomy. Either way, it forces you to get the best out of yourself, which is really important."

Boys play football in New Delhi, India, ahead of a youth football tournament in the capital city, 8 October 2017.

She finds that her background as a photojournalist gives her a unique perspective on sports coverage. "I get more feature work out of sports because I'll see something that’s happening alongside the main action. I have a journalistic viewpoint, which is also important in sports – I see a story from the human perspective."

Maja is always on the lookout for the bigger story. "Getty is pretty open to anything you want to do. If you have a story you want to pursue, they’ll try to find a way to run it. I like to do longer journalistic pieces over spot news. But I'm also the kind of person who hears a bomb has gone off somewhere and just goes to where it has happened. I would call the office before I left, though!"

Telling stories

"I like to tell stories that are not so well known, such as the project I did in 2015 with my journalist friend about palm oil in Sierra Leone." This series explored the impact that the arrival of a multinational palm oil company was having on locals in the West African nation. As rainforests were levelled to plant oil palms, Maja photographed plantation workers, the production process and the villagers refusing to give up their ancestral lands.

In her project Lost Generation, Maja turned her lens on Syrian refugee children living in Lebanon – the majority of whom no longer attend school, and have instead become a cheap form of labour, working long hours in fields, farms, shops and on the streets.

It's this kind of work which moves her, and that Maja hopes to do more of in the future: "When I see something happening, and it moves me, I want to be there," she says. "I feel that way about the refugee crisis in Slovenia – I'm still angry at myself for coming to it so late. When I was freelance I pitched it to editors, but they didn't send me – I was just burning inside."

If you’re a photojournalist and you see something that really makes you feel angry, you need to go and cover it.

Maja has since travelled across her home country documenting the struggles of migrants making their way across the border. Her images show families in their temporary shelters, crossing rivers and queuing patiently as they are shepherded onto buses, all the while watched over by lines of Slovenian police. "If you’re a photojournalist and you see something that really makes you feel angry, you need to cover it."